The international retail industry, particularly in respect of fast moving consumer goods (“FMCG”), consumer packaged goods (“CPG”), durable and major appliances, has experienced significant growth in recent years. Large manufacturers ship to and sell their products in a number of countries around the world. As with all things however, there are various challenges facing the retail industry, which include, effective marketing and promotion of products; determining the effectiveness of implemented marketing and promotion strategies; protecting brand authenticity from knock-off, counterfeit or imitation products; protecting products tampering and/or identifying products whose integrity may have been compromised, and the like.
For example, product manufactures and/or retailers may promote products by incentivizing the purchase of the products by offering discounts, buy-one-get-one-free offers, other specials, as well as employing other incentive based strategies. For instance, a manufacturer may instruct a retailer to discount a particular product for a predetermined period of time. In doing so, the manufacturer may be hoping to win new consumers over from competing products. Alternatively, a product may be offered free of charge with the purchase of an associated product. Such a promotion also tends to run for a predetermined period of time or while stocks last.
However, it may be difficult or even impossible to determine if new consumers were in fact persuaded into buying the relevant products by the promotions or whether they would have purchased the product irrespective of the reduced price. This implies that the retailer may have incurred an unnecessary loss by giving existing loyal consumers discounts when they would have purchased the product at the original price in any event.
Furthermore, manufactures or retailers may have no way of knowing what lead the consumer to purchase the product. In addition, manufactures or retailers do not have easy access to consumers' opinions of a product after it has been purchased, nor do they know the light in which their product is shown to the user's contacts or is recommended to such contacts, if at all. While there are often prompts or request for consumers to rate a product, or even to recommend the product to a contact, the incentive to the recommender to do so remains weak. As a result, consumers may be less inclined to take the time to rate or recommend a product. In addition, in most cases where products are in fact recommended by consumers to their other contacts, there is typically no way for manufacturers and/or retailers of knowing that the product was so recommended or, in fact of identifying when a consumer acts on a recommendation.
These marketing and incentive strategies are of course of no use if products which reach consumers have been tampered with or are otherwise contaminated. For example, fast moving consumer, or consumer packaged goods are often packaged and transported in disposable containers which are prone to tampering, thereby permitting the products contained therein to be contaminated or altered without the knowledge of the consumer. Attempts to curb tampering include various forms of tamper proof, tamper evident or security seals and although such seals are typically easy to use and provide a good means of indicating any tampering with a container, such seals can be easily overcome, the product contaminated and the seal replaced without the consumer's knowledge. Furthermore, such security seals are normally only capable of indicating whether a container has been opened while the status or integrity of the product remains unknown to a consumer.
Similarly, due to the successes of certain products internationally, counterfeit or imitation products, more commonly referred to as “knock-off” products, are manufactured worldwide by unscrupulous operators and are sold in markets where they compete with the originator products. Manufacturers are therefore struggling to protect the authenticity of their branded products from these knock-off products. Similarly, consumers are often not able to confirm the authenticity of products as they are often intended, by means of imitation packaging and even actual product appearances, to deceive the consumer into believing they originate from the original manufacturer.
The applicant is aware of radio frequency identification (“RFID”) tags that have been used with some success in the industry to attempt to alleviate the abovementioned problem. RFID tags may be secured to products, often in obscured positions, and can be wirelessly read by RFID and, more recently, near field communication (“NFC”) readers. Once so read, RFID tags convey static information stored on them to the interrogating devices. To do so RFID tags typically include a non-volatile memory module storing identification information about the product. An electronic product code (“EPC”) is one common type of data stored in an RFID tag.
A problem with RFID tags is, however, that the information that they contain and that they convey to readers is of a static nature. In other words, a tag will convey the same information to any authorized reader or interrogation device on any number of successive interrogations. The static nature of the information conveyed during interrogation makes RFID tags vulnerable to unauthorized replication, thereby negating their intended function.